The French Quarter, with little sleep, on our first day.

Day 1: October 2, 1999, continued.

In the French Quarter, we immediately found the Mississippi River, and the paddlewheel boat named "Natchez". They have nighttime jazz cruises available on this paddlewheel, but we decided that we would miss our appointment with the voodoo people if we stayed for it (and getting a voodoo museum mad at you might just not be a very great idea). The French Quarter extends towards the city from this point, so we headed inland.

Here we found the church at Jackson Square. It seems that a Pope even visited this particular site at one time. He wasn't still around, so we headed on and found, just outside the church, a group of musicians playing some good old-fashioned New Orleans Jazz.

Since this area was right outside the church, there were signs posted that warned people that loud noises or other carousing and merry - making (such as that provided by the jazz band) was not to be permitted this close to a church. The players that were there that day didn't seem to mind the presence of those signs one little bit, and so neither did we.

We continued to look around the French Quarter, with all of the buildings (or most of them) covered with wrought-iron balconies and hanging plants. There were opportunities to go in horse-drawn carriages for a more leisurely tour of the area, but we decided against paying money to sit behind a smelly beast for an hour or so. As we wandered, we kept heading towards the voodoo museum so that sooner or later we would be in the right place for our tour. Naturally, we found many different restaurants, but we were unsure of exactly where we wanted to start out with (given that we knew very little of this town). We wandered into Pat O's bar to use the bathroom, but, since we weren't really there do do any drinking, we didn't even get a souvenir glass to take home.

We ended up at the voodoo museum and talked with the receptionist-guy a tiny bit to make sure that he had us on his list for the nightly tour (which he did). He then suggested that if we wanted to get some food that was truly unique to the New Orleans area, we should head over to Ralph & Kacoo's and get the stuffed soft-shell crawfish or the alligator meat appetizers. Well, that sounded good to us, so we headed towards where he had told us that this restaurant was.

Well, the inside of Ralph & Kacoo's is a very overly-decorated place with a stuffed tiger on an overhang above the tables, and the tables were packed, but we finally got one and decided to try some of the local cuisine. Craig got a large portion of the alligator. Half of it was deep-fried and reminded me of very tender chicken "chunks". The other half of his order was cajun-blackened -- and this was certainly the better portion of the dish. With the Hollandaise sauce, the blackened gator was excellent. My dish was the stuffed soft-shell crawfish, which we were not overly impressed with. I assume that soft-shell crawfish are very hard to find and very expensive, so what we ended up geting was a very tasty hush-puppy that had wrapped itself around a tiny, little soft-shell crawfish. I'm not sure if anyone could've actually tasted the little guy buried in all that stuffing, but... Well, we at least got hooked on the alligator meat, and the size of the large appetizers was enough to quench our hunger.

We walked all the way back to the voodoo museum for our tour. At this point, I have to tell you that all this walking that I'm talking about is not just a few hundred yards this-a-way and a few hundred that-a-way. Rather, the portions of the French Quarter that we were hoofing it through was probably a good ten-block area. Our legs were already getting tired, but we'd already paid for our walking tour, so it was time to just sigh, sit for a little video on the voodoo culture and then grit our teeth for more walking around.

The voodoo museum itself is a place with various displays of voodoo-dolls and semi-catholic altars to the virgin mary and all the voodoo saints/gods that were merged together by the early swamp residents. The tour we were to take was the nightly 8:00 pm "Tour of the Undead", which is billed as the ONLY nighttime voodoo, vampire, and ghost trilogy. The pamphlet told us about "A bizzare lesson in New Orleans history and her peculiar inhabitants -- the Night Mares -- Nosferatu -- all children of the night! Explore at least 8 haunted sites and a vampires' lair. Graphic tales of debauch, blood lust, and torture. A macabre marriage of gothic horror, fears, and folklore providing a very lurid alternate history! WARNING: Scholarly and Scintillating." Well, with that sort of self-praise, we were prepared for a very interesting night.

First, the tour started by going through the museum and seeing all the voodoo artifacts that had been collected. The two pictures that I took are from inside the museum. Then Christian (our tour guide, dressed in all black) took us outside and proceeded to hike a few blocks this-a-way to show is the place where a lady had frozen to death on a balcony (she was to stay outside on the balcony all night to prove her love for her beau). She was said to haunt that spot on cold, frozen nights.

Next, we saw an old building on the site where the Spanish troops had caught their officers stealing from the Spanish treasury. They, the story went, tortured those officers to death in many heinous fashions, including the worst torture, which was to place a huge swamp-rat in a short ceramic sewage pipe, place one end of the pipe against the guilty man's stomach firmly, and heat the other end with torches to force the retreating swamp-rat to burrow out the cooler end. Nice, huh?

We heard stories and saw the place where a prominent New Orleans family tortured and killed 176 slaves in bizzare medical experiments, one of which included an insane sort of crab-girl whose limbs were constantly broken and re-set at odd angles until she could only "skitter" across the floor like a crab. We saw the place that had inspired Anne Rice in her vampire books (and is told about in exhaustive detail in her prose). We even saw a cloistered church where the local Catholic deity keep their records. The attic eaves-windows are shuttered tight and sealed with 300 blessed screws each to keep everyone out (or to keep something inside). The tale is told of French women that were brought over to New Orleans to help populate the city. They travelled with all their belongings in coffins and were named the corpse-women. After their arrival, the murder rate doubled in New Orleans, which caused local residents to start to wonder if any stray coffins had been shipped over along with those women. The tale goes on until the point where a couple was found, drained of their blood, on the steps of the church. At that point, the church sealed the attic with the blessed screws (300 for each window), but we were told that people still see those shutters open on very rare nights -- nights which coincide with the sort of activity that would be attributed to vampires roaming around the city.

Well, around 10:30 we got back to the car and decided that, since we had been awake since 2:00 am that morning, it was time to go back to the hotel for the night and rest.

Now you are prepared for next adventure: Day 2! (available soon)